Google have announced a new feature in their Webmaster Tools. In a nutshell it will display all pages that link to a missing page on your site – you have a chance to fix it or take advantage of it.

So, if a site was linking to an erroneously spelt page then you could create a redirect for this to the correct page – ensuring you still get the visitors to the appropriate page.

BMTG was okay (apart from a misspelling on my own blog, so I was able to correct that) as was Copy+. However, I can see the advantage of this tool and will be keeping an eye on it in future.

One of the great advantages of running a site such as Copy+ is the potential for publicity – both for us to receive and also to give. Therefore after stumbling across a piece of hardware that would be ideal for users of the Copy+ software, I got in contact with the distributor.

Not only did I get a 10% discount for everyone in kind return for the publicity, but they’ve even sent me (or rather the Copy+ author, Stuart) some of their hardware – in this case a SATA hard drive dock. You simply drop 1 or 2 SATA hard drives into this device, which is connected to your PC via USB, to access them.

Brilliant! And I look forward to Stuarts review – assuming all goes well we can eagerly promote this product further on our site.

However, one thing struck him. And tickled me. The logo to the right was on the front of the box. No hammers or chisels required apparantly. Damn, and they’re a vital part of my PC repair kit.

Back on the 22nd August I set out on the promotional trail, advertising the fact that +Extract is now available on the Copy+ site.

A lot of our traffic comes from popular technology forums, so I put together some post text and went around letting them know. I was upfront – said I was from the site and I just wanted to let them know about it. These sites were targeted because I know the forum users come to our site already and have discussed it before. So they know about us.

All went well until I got to AVForums. Well, I got there. Dropped my post and moved on. The next thing I know I’ve got an email titled “Your Recent Spam Attack on AVForums has been thwarted”. And it’s a big email beginning with…

Your recent posts on the AV Forums have been classified as spam and deleted. Your account at the AV Forums has also been banned.

Your details are kept on file and should you attempt to re-register and spam us again, we will remove your posts with a similar degree of ease.  Possibly before you have chance to post.  And repeated spam attacks will result in your IP address being banned, too.

And so on. Pretty hard hitting stuff all things considered.

So not only has the post gone but my personal account with the forum has gone too.

I’ve emailed them (although even this was difficult as it wouldn’t let me back on the site, and didn’t present me with an option to sign out – in the end I went to the site using a different browser) stating that I won’t do it again, but have asked for confirmation on how I can possibly talk about the software in future without this happening again.

About 30 hours later and I’d not had a response. By this time I’d signed up under a different name (they do state in the email that they’ll only ban me for this if I sign up again and spam again) so I post to their “Admin” section of the board asking for confirmation of what I should do in the future.

Within minutes I get the following response…

You were banned by the administrator for spamming the site.

You are now banned again for re-registering.

Now, hold on, this isn’t against the rules. There is a rule saying you shouldn’t be registered twice – I’m not as the first one was banned.

It’s just frustrating that they don’t have the decency to just talk to me about it, which they still haven’t. Yes, I know it’s their board and their rules. Equally, I was about to add links to their forum on our site, but not when they have a stinking attitude like this. As I’ve said before Copy+ is provided free of charge and we need promotion from forums such as this to make it worthwhile.